I am a Microsoft C# MVP, author, speaker, blogger, developer, and creator of WP Requests and WinStore Requests.
I've been involved with computers in one way or another for as long as I can remember, but started professionally in 1993. Although my primary focus right now is commercial software applications, I prefer building infrastructure components, reusable shared libraries and helping companies define, develop and automate process and code standards and guidelines.

There was a recent discussion on The Code Project about the virtues of refactoring. This rather quickly turned in to a question about what the difference is between refactoring and rewriting code. I have worked for a manager who loved to say "I'm confident in my ability to refactor" whenever we would talk about making sure the initial design was solid. So, what is the difference? I think John Simmons provided the best definition. Rewriting implies that you are throwing away all (or most) of the existing ......

If you are a PowerShell developer, or are just interested in learning more about Windows PowerShell, be sure to check out this 44 page e-book from Microsoft Switzerland (yes, it's in English). The associated demos are also available ......

Up until now, if you were developing an Office Business Application (OBA) there weren't a lot of resources available. OBA Central means to change that. It is a community site that brings together Microsoft, Microsoft OBA ISVs, services partners and customers, making it easy to connect. There are already a few Microsoft Partners featured on the site ......

Reading Joe Healy's blog, I came across a post about a really impressive bit of advertising done by MSN France. It's in French and is a Flash app (not Silverlight, which is disappointing), but it is still very impressive.

The C# Unified Language Specification is now available for review. If you are wondering why it is called the "Unified" language specification, it pulls together information from the C# 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 specifications into a single unified document.

To go along with the release of Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft has also released the Release Candidate (RC) 1 of Silverlight 1.0 and a refresh for Silverlight 1.1. You can get more information about the releases on Tim Sneath's blog. If you install both Silverlight 1.1 and Visual Studio 2008, be sure to check out the Microsoft Silverlight Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Beta, which is an add-on for Visual Studio to provide a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications in ......

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has been officially released as both disc images and Virtual PC (VPC) images. After the installation has finished, you should run this script to ensure that the installation of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 will not affect the development of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications. To go along with this, the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 is also available and includes a go-live license. The Framework is expected to be released near the end of 2007. It will be included in Visual ......

Garbage collection is one of the most fundamental aspects of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and is available to all .NET programming languages. Unfortunately, it also seems to be one of the more difficult concepts to understand correctly, both how it works and how to use it. Understanding how the garbage collection system in .NET works is important, but it isn't as important as understanding how to use it correctly. Think about your car...we generally don't have intimate knowledge of how ......

Earlier this month, Microsoft officially announced their decision to move all Microsoft professional certification and Microsoft Dynamics exams to Prometric. Pearson VUE will no longer be selling exams after August 31, 2007. For anyone who purchases an exam from Pearson VUE through August 31, Pearson will be able to administer that exam through December 31, 2007. More details are promised in the upcoming months, but for now there is a Frequently Asked Questions page ......

A word of advice: Don't ever leave your cell phone in a theme park. That's what happened to me on Thursday night, and in less than 5 minutes (the time it took for me to walk away, realize I didn't have it, and go back) it was gone. If this were a normal cell phone, I wouldn't be quite so annoyed about it. Unfortunately, it was an i-mate JasJar. Since there are not very many of these in the U.S. (at least not where I live), I would be very surprised if someone turned it in to customer service at the ......

While it probably won't have much real impact of Visual Studio 2008, Rico Marianai just recently announced that he is moving into the role of Chief Architect for Visual Studio. A lot of the performance improvements in VS 2008 are a result of Rico's involvement. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the next release ......

CIO has an interesting article providing a good explanation of blogs and wikis and why you should care about them in the business world. From the article, blogs and wikis are an Indispensable business collaboration tools and a powerful means of communicating with customers, partners and employees, wikis and blogs have been compared to e-mail in terms of their potential impact on the enterprise. While the article provides an excellent introduction, isn't it a little bit late? Blogs came about (at ......

As I was building the Internet Calendar for Tampa Code Camp, I realized that I have the dubious distinction of being the only Chalk Talk session. I am a little bit surprised since this format (which is very similar to the Birds of a Feather session format from Tech·Ed) provides a good round-table interactive discussion on the topic. If you are going to Tampa Code Camp, be sure to check out my session on Code Style and Standards. The session is scheduled at 10:50 AM in Room 451. As a teaser to get ......

At the Microsoft® Worldwide Partner Conference today, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner announced that Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world. Also in the works is Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008, which should be available as a free download in the next three weeks and will also support a go-live license ......

In keeping with the work I did for Tech·Ed 2007 to create Internet Calendars for the different technical tracks, I have created a similar calendar for Tampa Code Camp. The calendar is available from Microsoft Office Online as an Outlook 2007 Internet Calendar Subscription. If you are still using Outlook 2003, there is an open-source add-in that allows you to work with Internet Calendars ......

Recently, Jason posted about bad development managers. Like Jason, I was also told early in my career that "Sales and Marketing is the natural enemy of Development". I also learned early on that this isn't entirely true. While it is true that the sales team will sell products that don't exist yet and features that don't exist or that are technical implausible to build in the timeframe promised, it is generally due to customer demand. Whether you like it or not, if you develop commercial software ......

According to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Vista SP1 beta 1 to launch in mid-July, with the final version around November 2007. A November release is also the target for RTM of Windows Server 2008, which, if they meet the deadlines means that they were able to stick to a schedule announced a year ago when they announced Vista SP! and Windows Server 2008 will be released simultaneously. Apparently, the Microsoft Windows Client team is trying to clamp down on the amount of information available relating to ......

Thank you to everyone who nominated Subtext for a Community Choice Award. Your nominations have made Subtext a finalist in the following categories: Most Collaborative Project: The project most likely to accept your patches and value your input. Best Project for Communications: The best project for talking to your friends or sharing information. I think both of these categories very accurately reflect what Subtext is all about. It's great to see that the community feels the same. Voting has already ......

I am pleased to announce that I just won 4th place for the June 2007 Community Credit competition. This is 4th place out of a total of 7214 members. The even more amazing thing, at least to me, is that I managed to win 4th place with an 85% curve on my points as part of the handicapping system. The worst is that now I have an even higher handicap to beat. So, what did I win? An awesome green laser pointer, which is about 50 times brighter than a red laser pointer. It uses Diode Pumped Solid State ......